Is Barclays finally going to work with Apple Pay in 2016?

At first, there was excitement as rumours started flying last July that Apple would be bringing its highly anticipated payment service, Apple Pay, to the UK shores. Private documents belonging to Waitrose revealed that Apple Pay would be coming to UK stores on the 14th July.

Most banks all in

When it did eventually arrive on the aforementioned date, the likes of Natwest, Nationwide, RBS and Santander all signed up. HSBC came slightly later to the fray due to some last-minute setbacks, although a bank spokeswoman had to deny that the delay was a punishment by Apple for HSBC accidentally announcing the planned launch date ahead of time.

Barclays fell far from the tree

And Barclays? Barclays became the only one of the ‘Big Four’ UK banks that didn’t sign up to the new mobile payment service. There were suggestions that Barclays was keen to preserve its own position in the mobile market in the form of Pingit: in the week running up to Apple Pay’s launch, the bank signed a deal with payments provider Zapp that allowed users to make online transactions through Zapp’s ‘Pay by Bank’ application on smartphones.

However, on the day of Apple Pay’s launch, the bank said that the service would work with Barclays cards in ‘the near future’.

Then we waited. And waited. Waited as Apple Pay launched in new countries. Waited as it got more banks on board. Until finally in 2016 we got some unofficial confirmation that Barclays is finally going ahead with adopting the service.

Barclays on Apple Pay in Spring

Barclays has confirmed that it will start working on Apple Pay in the next two months, according to MacRumours. The original source came from a tweet from a Barclays customer, who posted the following two-week email reply from Barclays CEO of Personal.

I caught up with Guillaume Andre, Head of Marketing, Ingenico Northern Europe, to discuss the implications of a tech giant-payments provider collaboration-led future, and how Ingenico and Google might continue to innovate the POS system in the future.

The future is even closer than we think. The increasing pace of technological change means concepts formerly considered only abstract theories on a distant horizon are already nearly upon us. By Urs Gubser, Head E-Commerce, SIX Payment Services.